[AHEM] Anyway, once you get past the pyem competition's woeful lack of creative juicery, you're left with some numbers. As spelled out in more detail in both stories (what you see above is the Missourian's display type and the Trib's lede), the head of the Missouri Theatre Centre For the Artes thyng is hoping to cap off the fund drive with a personal door-to-door effort. He's going to visit 450 homes a day, or 25,000 homes over eight weeks, and try to raise $20 from each one.

See where we might have a problem with this?

The basic DTFM rule is "when you see two numbers, do something to them." By extension, it means look for all the implied numbers and do similar stuff to them. Let's start with the easy ones: $20 x 25,000 = $500,000, check. 450 x 7 = 3,150, x 8 = 25,200, check, with a little room to spare. All he has to do now is get to 450 homes a day. Quick: If Mr. White works 16 hours a day, how much time on average does he have to get to each house, knock on the door, find someone within, make his pitch for $20, collect, and say thanks?

Let's give him the spare 200 houses above and round the total down to 28 an hour. He still sounds like a pretty busy fellow -- seven days a week for eight weeks. He'd better be persuasive, too: Unless he's armed, it might take a little more than the allotted two minutes and change to talk folks out of their $20. And you know what else? Some dude shows up at the door of Stately HEADSUP-L Manor at 10:45 on a Sunday night wearing a Waldo hat and asking for 20 simoleons, I'm going to set the cats on him. And they like protein.Copyeds, if you want a friend, get a dog. If you want earthly isolation now with the promise of a future reward, DTFM.